With its red rocks, grandiose forests and awe-inspiring terrain, Utah is a popular destination for outdoors lovers and photographers year-round. When fall rolls around, the landscape comes alive with color.
As professional photographers, Jeremiah Barber, based out of St. George, Clint Losee, based out of American Fork, and Tom Till, based out of Moab, have captured Utah’s fiery, autumnal beauty. They’ve provided us with 11 photos showing what you can look forward to seeing this fall, and some insights behind them.
Jeremiah Barber
“The mountains above Cedar City burst with color every fall,” Barber said. This image in particular was captured near a cabin community called the Cedar Highlands. Barber said that looking up the mountain to the east just south of Cedar City on I-15 will reveal an eruption of color near the end of September.
Zion National Park is another place of opportunity to see the fall colors in Utah. In October, higher elevations flourish, while the lower elevations into the Narrows last through the first few weeks of November.
Near the Utah border, Great Basin National Park in Nevada is one of Barber’s favorite landscapes, and he says the best part is the lack of crowds. He describes it as an “out-of-the-way destination, but spectacular.” The golden aspens “starkly contrast” with the pines seen there, which are best caught during the end of September and the first part of October.
Clint Losee
The Alpine Loop is one of Losee’s favorite drives for fall colors, which includes many places to stop and hike. While weather conditions may allow for colors to pop up around mid-September, Losee says the end of September or beginning of October are the best times to see Mount Timpanogos covered in yellow aspens.
Big Mountain Pass near Salt Lake is a great scenic drive that isn’t too far away. Losee has seen the best expansive views during the first part of October from the top of the canyon.
Losee has found expansive mountain overlooks with great colors at Guardsman Pass. If you take the drive down through Wasatch Mountain State Park into Heber, “the colors keep getting better,” Losee says. Even when the weather gets cooler and the colors start to fade, Losee says that patches of trees hold onto their color later in the season, which makes for an interesting view.
Tom Till
Till has considerable experience taking photos in the La Sal Mountains, just south of Moab, which he can see right outside his window. He enjoys taking land and drone images of the multi-colored aspen trees in the area.
“Boulder Mountain has the reddest aspens I have ever seen,” Till said of his time in Capitol Reef National Park. “When the light of the sunrise hits them, the view is out of this world.”
Having also worked back East, Till praises the maples found in Northern Utah, Bryce and Zion for being “just as beautiful as anything in New Hampshire or Vermont.”
Till was also featured in an article by Deseret News in 1993. Read more about his life and work here.